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From the outset, it is very clear what The Upside wants to be. This a movie that aspires towards a broad feel-good mood. Perhaps its closest companion in this particular awards cycle is Green Book. It is easy to be cynical about such films, and it is particularly easy to be cynical about The Upside. The film’s delayed release is not the result of a studio desperately holding a hidden gem until late in awards season, this is a would-be crowd pleaser pried from the cold dead hands of the Weinstein Company.

Hart to heart.

Everything in The Upside seems designed to guide an audience on an emotionally uplifting journey, a story of two characters from very different circumstances brought together so that each might elevate the other. All of the big moments in The Upside are no so much telegraphed as broadcast, the volume turned up to eleven. Characters scream and shout, at both each other and the world around them. Catharsis isn’t just sought, it is amplified. There is no moment at which The Upside leaves the audience in any doubt about what they should feel.

The result is a clumsy and awkward piece of cinema that constantly trips over itself, repeatedly undermining anything meaningful or significant that it might have to say about either of its two central characters.

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney and this week with special guest Kieran Gillen, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s Intouchables.

Sparks fly and worlds collide when a wealthy quadriplegic hires an unemployed former felon to serve as his personal care nurse. Philippe and Driss forge an unlikely and heartwarming bond, coming to a deeper understanding of on another and the world around them.

At time of recording, it was ranked the 38th best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

The first two-thirds of Elegy count as the best episode of The X-Files that John Shiban has written at this point of his tenure on the writing staff. Elegy starts out as an episode that leans into Shiban’s strengths. It is a very traditional and old-fashioned horror story, the first tried-and-tested ghost story that The X-Files has told in a while. The idea of a haunted bowling alley is so wonderfully weird and so quintessentially American that it fits The X-Files perfectly. For its first thirty minutes, Elegy is funereal and sombre, haunting and enchanting.

Elegy is a story packed with potentially interesting concepts. It is overflowing with clever ideas and memorable images. Shiban is a writer who has a great deal of affection for classic horror, and that affection shines through into Elegy. There is a slow and sorrowful atmosphere to the early stretches of the episode. Transparent grey spectres are a staple of the horror genre, but they work very well in this context. The X-Files has been quite reluctant to handle traditional monsters, so there is something rather strange and affecting about seeing such a classic depiction here.

Here there be ghosts…

Then things go to hell. To be fair, the problems with the last fifteen of Elegy are very much suggested from the start; they are just pushed to the fore. It becomes quite clear that Elegy has no idea how to resolve a “haunted bowling alley” story, so the script hastily and clumsily transitions to an “abusive care home” plot. The first two thirds of Elegy are not that interested in the character of Harold Spuller beyond his use as a plot device; a fact that becomes quite apparent in how the final third callously disposes of him.

Elegy is an episode that brushes against greatness. Its best ideas rank with the highlights of the fourth season. Unfortunately, all of that is undercut by a truly terrible final act.

The first annual International Disability Film Festival is being hosted from the 20th through to the 23rd October, organised byArts & Disability Ireland, in Dublin and Galway. I was honoured to be invited to the gala screening of the Oscar-winning HBO documentary Music by Prudence. You can read more information on the festival here.

Music by Prudence is an absolutely fascinating documentary from director Roger Ross Williams, looking at the band Liyana, fronted by Prudence Mabhena. The thirty-three minute documentary does a wonderfully effective job giving us a snapshot into the Zimbabwean band, composed of faculty and students from the King George VI Centre and School for Children with Physical Disabilities. The runtime is remarkably short, but Williams compensates by giving us a whirlwind introduction to the band’s lead singer, who has enough charm and wit to carry a far longer documentary. The band themselves provide a beautiful soundtrack, and there’s talk of them releasing two albums off the back of the film’s success.